**ABSTRACT
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Proof of Concept: Use of DIDSON Cameras to
Estimate Adult Sea Lamprey Abundance in Streams

Effective
assessment and control of invasive sea lamprey in the Laurentian Great Lakes
relies on knowledge of adult sea lamprey migration timing. We investigated
adult sea lamprey migration timing by mining historical trap catch data and
deploying Dual-frequency Identification Sonar (DIDSON) at the mouth of a Great
Lakes tributary. Over the Great Lakes basin during the past
30 years, trap catch generally peaked at 15° C and was highly correlated with
stream temperatures. Furthermore, several streams are now reaching 15° C
earlier in the spring and are experiencing peak trap catch up to 30 days sooner
than in the 1980s. Our analysis of historical trap catchdata
did not reveal when sea lamprey enter spawning streams because most assessment
traps are located many kilometers upstream of the river mouth. Therefore, the
timing of sea lamprey stream entry was assessed in a Lake Huron tributary (Ocqueoc River) during two years using DIDSON. Sea lamprey
entered the stream in low densities when temperatures first reached 4°C, which
was up to 6 weeks earlier than they were first captured
in traps located upstream. Stream entry timing peaked when stream temperatures
rose to 12°C and discharge was high. Examination at a finer temporal resolution
(i.e., minutes) indicated that sea lamprey did not exhibit social behavior
(i.e., shoaling) during stream entry. Manual processing of all the DIDSON data
was not practical, so we were unable to estimate the number of sea lamprey
entering the stream. As a first step toward automated processing of DIDSON and
other video data, a distributed pipeline was constructed
using the Hadoop ecosystem. The pipeline is capable of ingesting raw DIDSON
data, transforming the acoustic data to images, filtering the images, motion
detection and extraction, and feature generation for machine learning and
classification. Future applications of the pipeline could include monitoring
migration times, determining the presence of a particular species, and
estimating abundance.